20 July 2012

By 1863 Karl Marx had a sketch plan that was
beginning to resemble the shape of the full work that was published in 1867 as
“Capital, Volume 1”.

By 1865 when he did “Value, Price and
Profit” (download linked
below), Marx had solved most of the literary as well as the theoretical problems
of his master-work.

“Value, Price and Profit” is an address delivered by Karl
Marx at two sessions of the General Council of the First International on June
20 and 27, 1865. This is a point where Karl Marx’s theoretical work comes
face-to-face with his activities as a political leader, and actually the
principal political leader of the International Working Men’s Association,
otherwise known as the First International.

The Introduction to the 1969
edition of “Value, Price and Profit” makes clear that this June 1863
moment was crucial in the history of the organised working class, and that Marx
saved the day and saved the movement with this outstanding, classic piece of
work.

“Value, Price and Profit” has subsequently served various
purposes. Because it debunks the argument, still used by employers in South
Africa today, that wage rises cause unemployment, “Value, Price and Profit” has
been a mainstay for generations of shop stewards and union negotiators.

A version of the same anti-working-class “fixed fund”
argument countered by Marx was used by Richard Baloyi, the employing Public
Services Minister, during the 2010 public service workers’ strike in
Johannesburg. Another version is the economist Mike Schussler’s argument that
workers are overpaid in South Africa.

Furthermore, and prefiguring Lenin’s argument against
“Economism” four decades later in “What is to be Done?”, “Value, Price and
Profit” states clearly that trade unionism without political organisation will
never succeed in throwing off the yoke of capital (see the excerpt from Chapter
14).

This abridged version of “Value, Price and Profit” can also
serve as a “mini-Capital”, i.e. as the short version of “Capital” that so many
people yearn for. It will at least help us to get a better grip on some of the
key concepts such as Labour, Value, Labour-Power, Surplus-Labour, Surplus-Value
and Profit.

The two quoted paragraphs that follow are particularly
instructive. Hobbes’ 1651 book “Leviathan” was a tremendous groundbreaker; Karl
Marx notes here that Hobbes had “instinctively
hit upon this point overlooked by all his successors”, namely the
distinction between Labour-Power and Labour, which Marx had worked so hard and
so long to see clearly (see the remarks about the hunt for surplus value in our
earlier post on Wage Labour and Capital)

‘What the working man sells is not directly his labour, but his labouring
power, the temporary disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist. This is
so much the case that I do not know whether by the English Laws, but certainly
by some Continental Laws, the maximum time is fixed for which a man is allowed
to sell his labouring power. If allowed to do so for any indefinite period
whatever, slavery would be immediately restored. Such a sale, if it comprised
his lifetime, for example, would make him at once the lifelong slave of his
employer.

‘One of the oldest economists and most original
philosophers of England — Thomas Hobbes — has already, in his “Leviathan”, instinctively hit upon this point overlooked by all his successors. He
says: "the value or worth of a man is, as in all other things, his price:
that is so much as would be given for the use of his power." Proceeding
from this basis, we shall be able to determine the value of labour as that of all
other commodities.’

“Value, Price and Profit” includes a counter-intuitive
surprise in Marx’s statement that “Profit is made by Selling a Commodity at its Value”. Capitalism would
still exist even if it had to shed its nasty price-gouging habits. Capitalism
as such is not a simple swindle, but it is a system and a class relationship.

The source
of the “self-increase of capital” is located in the workplace, and not in the
marketplace. This is the fundamental message of “Capital”, the greatest
“classic” of them all. “Capital” will not be included here but it will have its
own separate, dedicated course. “Value, Price and Profit” will have to
represent it here.

In the next
part of this course on the classics, we will move to the period after the
publication of “Capital”, when with the active involvement of Marx and Engels,
the working-class movement revived, organised and expanded in Europe as never
before in history.